Mordechai Vanunu: What the World Needs to Know about Israel’s Nuclear Whistle-blower
PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 21 Sep 2015
Eileen Fleming – TRANSCEND Media Service
Mordechai Vanunu’s 8th High Court petition seeking to end all human rights restrictions against him is scheduled for 21 September 2015.
On September 4, Vanunu’s first interview to Israeli Media was broadcast in Hebrew. During his fifteen minutes on air Vanunu pleaded with the Israeli public who consider him a traitor:
Mordechai Vanunu
In the early hours of September 5, Vanunu was arrested for the interview according to the police “in defiance of the terms under which he was released in 2004.” Although the military censor had cleared the interview for broadcast Vanunu was confined to his home without Internet or phone for 7 days.
Background:
In 1986, Vanunu was a midlevel technician on the night shift within Israel’s underground WMD facility in the Negev Valley. The sign out front proclaimed it was a Textile Plant. All employees signed a secrecy agreement and all jobs were compartmentalized.
Because Vanunu was a good worker, he was cross-trained in many areas and when he realized he was a cog in the making of weapons of mass destruction he decided to document the facts by photographing the evidence. Vanunu easily obtained the keys to restricted areas after they had been carelessly left in the shower room by a supervisor. Vanunu shot two rolls of film in top-secret locations but did not develop the film until ten months later while in Sydney, Australia.
On 5 October 1986, London’s “Sunday Times” published Vanunu’s photos in a front page story under the headline “Revealed: the secrets of Israel’s nuclear arsenal” just as Vanunu was being kidnapped by Mossad in Rome and transported back to Israel. Israel convicted Vanunu for treason and espionage in a closed-door trial and locked him up for 18 years, most all of it in solitary. Vanunu has not set foot into the Dimona in 30 years and International Inspectors never have.
On April 21, 2004, Vanunu was released from Ashkelon Prison and ever since has lived under the draconian 1945 British Mandate State of Emergency Regulations. After WW II, Attorney Yaccov Shapiro, who later became Israel’s Minister Of Justice, described the Emergency Defense Regulations which deny Vanunu his inalienable rights as “unparalleled in any civilized country: there were no such laws in Nazi Germany.”[N.S. Ateek, “Justice and Only Justice” p.34]
In June 2005, I was just an American in east Jerusalem writing my first historical fiction when I met Vanunu. I realized my childhood dream and became a reporter because Vanunu told me:
“The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Gurion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.
“Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’ Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben-Gurion open up the Dimona for inspection.
“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.”
“30 Minutes with Vanunu” was taped in 2006, and all my questions sprang from my first: “If the British Mandate has expired why not the British Mandate’s Emergency Defense Regulations?”
Vanunu replied, “The reason given is security but it is because Israel is not a democracy unless you are a Jew. This administration tells me I am not allowed to speak to foreigners, the Media, and the world. But I do because that is how I prove my true humanity to the world. My freedom of speech trial began January 25, 2006 for speaking to the media, the same day as the Palestinian elections…When I decided to expose Israel’s nuclear weapons I acted out of conscience and to warn the world to prevent a nuclear holocaust.”
Just prior to the taping of “30 Minutes with Vanunu” he told me, “Many journalists come here to the American Colony, from CNN and NY Times. They all want to cover my story, but their EDITORS say no…CNN wants to interview me; but they say they can’t do it because they don’t want problems with the Israeli censor. BBC is doing the same thing. Sixty Minutes from the United States from the beginning they wanted to do a program, but because of the censor situation they decide not to do it.”
On July 2, 2007, Israel sentenced Vanunu to six more months in jail essentially because he spoke to foreign media in 2004. On September 23, 2008, the Jerusalem District Court reduced Vanunu’s sentence to three months, “In light of (Vanunu’s) ailing health and the absence of claims that his actions put the country’s security in jeopardy.”
On July 6, 2009, the Supreme Court stated, “Pending a review of his conduct, Vanunu will be able to ask for the restrictions to be lifted and be allowed to travel abroad… The state’s representative noted that six months may be too short a time period to determine a change in Vanunu’s behavior and that the state will reconsider the restrictions based not only on Vanunu’s behavior but a host of other considerations, including the time that had lapsed since he divulged state secrets to the British paper.”
In 2010, Israel sent Vanunu back to solitary confinement for 78 days-essentially because he spoke to foreign media in 2004! It is now thirty years since Vanunu “divulged state secrets” and about ten since Vanunu told me: “All the secrets I had were published in 1989 in an important book, by [Nuclear Physicist] Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb: Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East.”
A few days before Vanunu was lured from London to Rome and kidnapped by the Mossad, he spent three days being interviewed by Frank Barnaby. Barnaby had been employed by London’s “Sunday Times” to review the 57 photos Vanunu had obtained at various restricted locations in the Dimona and he also went to Jerusalem to provide expert testimony at Vanunu’s closed-door trial.
Barnaby testified, “I found the fact that Vanunu was able to smuggle a camera and films into and out of Dimona and photograph highly sensitive areas in the establishment astonishing. I very vigorously cross-examined Vanunu, relentlessly asking the same questions in a number of different ways and at different times… I found Vanunu very straightforward about his motives for violating Israel’s secrecy laws; he explained to me that he believed that both the Israeli and the world public had the right to know about the information he passed on. He seemed to me to be acting ideologically.
“Israel’s political leaders have, he said, consistently lied about Israel’s nuclear-weapons program and he found this unacceptable in a democracy. The knowledge that Vanunu had about Israel’s+ nuclear weapons, about the operations at Dimona, and about security at Dimona could not be of any use to anyone today. He left Dimona in October 1985 and the design of today’s Israeli nuclear weapons will have been considerably changed since then… Modern nuclear weapons bear little relationship to those of the mid-1980.”
A total of 1,200 pages of transcript of that closed door trial have been released and Vanunu told the court: “I wanted to confirm what everyone knew, I didn’t want Israel to go on denying that it had nuclear weapons, and Shimon Peres to go on lying to (then US president) Ronald Reagan, saying that we didn’t have a nuclear arsenal. I also wanted controls to be placed on these weapons.”
In the 80’s, Vanunu was transported to and from his closed door trial in a crash helmet, handcuffs and leg-irons, inside a van with blacked out windows that blasted noise to assure Vanunu would not communicate with journalists or supporters. During the court hearings, two Israeli security agents flanked him at all times in order to be able to cover his mouth if he began to reveal anything they deemed secret. The public, the press and all observers — even Amnesty International — were excluded from the hearings and the court’s judgment was censored before publication.
As of this writing the last thing Vanunu has publicly written was on September 7th at Facebook [edited for punctuation] The Modern Evil of the 20th,21st centuries, isolation, restrictions, sanctions, unjustly punishment, war crimes, to send people back to the ancient time, to the primitive age to became extreme, fanatics, fundamentalist, religious terrorists. I survived all this because I learned their mind. That what they are doing to me, and doing to Gaza, Palestine, Iran, and many states in all the Middle East. There is The Empire of Evil, The Axis of Evil, and now the Modern Evil.
_________________________________
Eileen Fleming is Senior Non-Arab Correspondent for USA’s The Arab Daily News.
Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation’s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.
DON’T BUY PRODUCTS WHOSE BARCODE STARTS WITH 729, which indicates that it is produced in Israel. DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Sep 2015.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Mordechai Vanunu: What the World Needs to Know about Israel’s Nuclear Whistle-blower, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
2 Responses to “Mordechai Vanunu: What the World Needs to Know about Israel’s Nuclear Whistle-blower”
Read more
Click here to go to the current weekly digest or pick another article:
PALESTINE - ISRAEL:
Israel has previously rescheduled Vanunu’s court dates at short notice and obviously has done so again.
21 Sept. email from Israel/Palestine Campaigner Middle East and North Africa Programme Amnesty International:
Members of the Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Middle East will be marking Mordechai Vanunu’s birthday (which falls on 13 October) with a vigil on Saturday 10 October at the Israeli embassy in London between 12 noon and 2pm. The gathering will be at the park end of Kensington High Street, opposite Kensington Palace Green which is as close as you can get to the Israeli Embassy is.
They plan to have placards and simple paper masks for people to wear if they wish. They will also have a birthday cake for Mordechai. As you know, the more people attend, the more publicity is given to his case so please try to attend if you can.
On 25 Sept. Vanunu wrote “Sep 10, Nine police men come to my home with a search warrant and arrest warrant,they took all my digitale stuff,computers, iPhone, memory stick,hard drive,camera,,CDs,every thing, with all the passwords to all my internet activity.they are still holding all these thing. Sep’ 25.I am back in the internet,after one week house arrest ,and 2 weeks no internet,all this for giving a TV interview in Hebrew, more than a decade after completing an 18-year jail term.”